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Treasure
Planet
Release
Date November 27th, 2002
SYNOPSIS:
A secret map inspires a thrilling treasure hunt across the universe as young Jim Hawkins and a hilarious cosmic crew headed by the daring Captain Amelia set off in search of their destiny. Aboard a glittering space galleon, Jim meets the ship's cyborg cook, John Silver, who teaches him the value of friendship and the power of dreams. Jim soon teams up with his crazy new robot pal, B.E.N., and the shape-shifting Morph to discover a treasure greater than he ever imagined.
FUN FACTS:
Treasure
Planet is a 2002 animated
science fiction film produced by Walt Disney Animation Studios, and released by
Walt Disney Pictures on November 27, 2002. The 43rd animated feature in the Walt
Disney Animated Classics, the film is a science fiction adaptation of Robert
Louis Stevenson's adventure novel Treasure Island and was the first film to be
released simultaneously in regular and IMAX theaters. The film employs a novel
technique of hand-drawn 2D traditional animation set atop 3D computer animation.
The film
was co-written, co-produced and directed by Ron Clements and John Musker, who
had pitched the concept for the film at the same time that they pitched The
Little Mermaid. Treasure Planet features the voices of Joseph
Gordon-Levitt, Brian Murray, David Hyde Pierce, martain Short, Roscoe Lee
Browne, Emma Thompson, Laurie Metcalf, and Patrick McGoohan (in his final film
role). The musical score was composed by James Newton Howard, while the songs
were written and performed by John Rzeznik. The film performed poorly in the
United States box office, costing $140 million to create while earning $38
million in the United States and Canada and just shy of $110 million worldwide.
It was nominated for the 2002 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
Plot
The
film's prologue depicts Jim Hawkins as a three-year-old (voiced by Austin
Majors) reading a storybook in bed. Jim is enchanted by stories of the
legendary pirate Captain Flint and his ability to appear from nowhere, raid
passing ships, and disappear in order to hide the loot on the mysterious
"Treasure Planet". Twelve years later, Jim (now voiced by Joseph
Gordon-Levitt) has grown into an aloof and alienated teenager. He is shown
begrudgingly helping his mother Sarah (Laurie Metcalf) run an inn and deriving
amusement from "solar surfing" (a hybrid of skysurfing and windsurfing
atop a board attached to a solar-powered rocket), a pastime that frequently
gets him in trouble.
One day,
a spaceship crashes near the inn. The dying pilot, Billy Bones (Patrick
McGoohan), gives Jim a sphere and tells him to "beware the cyborg".
Shortly thereafter, a gang of pirates raid and burn the inn. Jim, his mother,
and their dog-like friend Dr. Delbert Doppler (David Hyde Pierce) barely
escape. The sphere turns out to be a holographic projector, showing a map that
Jim realizes leads to Treasure Planet.
Doppler
commissions a ship called RLS Legacy, on a mission to find Treasure
Planet. The ship is commanded by the cat-like, sharp-witted Captain Amelia (Emma
Thompson) along with her stony-skinned and disciplined First Mate, Mr. Arrow (Roscoe
Lee Browne). The crew is a motley bunch, secretly led by cook John Silver (Brian
Murray), whom Jim suspects is the cyborg of whom he was warned. Jim is sent
down to work in the galley; despite his mistrust of Silver, they soon form a
tenuous father-son relationship (a montage featuring the song "I’m Still
Here" shows Jim and the cyborg bonding over various sailing chores,
interspersed with flashbacks from Jim's childhood, during which his father
appears indifferent to him and finally leaves without warning when Jim is a
pre-teen). During an encounter with a supernova, Silver falls overboard but is
saved by Jim. The supernova then devolves into a black hole, where Arrow drifts
overboard and is lost, for which Jim blames himself for failing to secure the
lifelines, while in fact Arrow's line was cut by a ruthless insectoid crew
member named Scroop (Michael Wincott).
As the
ship reaches Treasure Planet, mutiny erupts, led by Silver. Jim, Doppler, and
Amelia abandon the ship, accidentally leaving the map behind. Silver, who
believes that Jim has the map, has a chance to kill Jim, but refuses to do so
because of his attachment to the boy. The fugitives are shot down by a mutineer
during their escape, causing injury to Amelia.
While
exploring Treasure Planet's forests, the fugitives meet B.E.N. (Martin Short),
an abandoned, whimsical robot who claims to have lost most of his memory and
invites them to his house to care for the wounded Amelia. The pirates corner
the group here; using a back-door, Jim and B.E.N. return to the ship in an
attempt to recover the map. Scroop, aboard the ship as lookout, stalks and
fights Jim. B.E.N., working to sabotage the ship's artillery, accidentally
turns off the artificial gravity, whereupon Jim and Scroop threaten to float off
into space. Jim grabs the mast while Scroop becomes entangled in the flag and
cuts himself free while Scroop floats away, presumably to his death. Jim and
B.E.N. obtain the map. Upon their return, they are captured by Silver, who has
already captured Doppler and Amelia.
When Jim
is forced to use the map, the group finds their way to a portal that can be
opened to any place in the universe; this being the means by which Flint
conducted his raids. The treasure is at the center of the planet, accessible
only via the portal. Treasure Planet is revealed to be a large space station
built by unknown architects and commandeered by Flint. In the stash of
treasure, Jim comes across the skeletal remains of Flint himself, holding a
missing part of B.E.N's cognitive computer. Jim replaces this piece, causing
B.E.N. to remember that the planet is set to explode upon the treasure's
discovery. In the ensuing catastrophe, Silver finds himself torn between
holding onto a literal boat-load of gold and saving Jim, who hangs from a
precipice after a fall. Silver saves Jim, and the group escapes to the Legacy,
which is damaged and lacks the motive power required to leave the planet in
time to escape. Jim attaches a rocket to a narrow plate of metal and rides it
toward the portal to open it to a new location while Doppler pilots the ship
behind him. Jim manages to open the portal to his home world's spaceport,
through which all escape the destruction of Treasure Planet.
After
the escape, Amelia has the surviving pirates imprisoned aboard the ship and
offers to recommend Jim to the Interstellar Academy for his heroic actions.
Silver sneaks below deck, where Jim finds him preparing his escape. Jim lets
him go, inheriting Silver's shape-changing pet called Morph (Dane A. Davis).
Silver predicts that Jim will "rattle the stars", then tosses him a
handful of jewels and gold he had taken from Treasure Planet to pay for
rebuilding the inn. The film ends with a party at the rebuilt inn, showing
Doppler and Amelia now married with children, and Jim a military cadet. He
looks to the skies and sees an image of Silver in the clouds.
Production
Development
Treasure
Planet took roughly four
and a half years to create, but the concept for Treasure Planet (which
was called "Treasure Island in Space" at the time) was originally pitched
by Ron Clements in 1985 during the meeting wherein he and John Musker also
pitched The Little Mermaid. Clements stated that Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was
the chief of Walt Disney Studios at the time, "just wasn't
interested" in the idea. Since Musker and Clements wanted to be able to
move "the camera around a lot like Steven Spielberg or James
Cameron," the delay in production was beneficial since "the
technology had time to develop in terms of really moving the camera."
Principal animation for the film began in 2000 with roughly 350 crew members
working on it. In 2002, Roy Conli estimated that there were around 1,027 crew
members listed in the screen credits with "about four hundred artists and
computer artists, about a hundred and fifty musicians and another two hundred
technologists".
According
to Conli, Clements wanted to create a space world that was "warm and had
more life to it than you would normally think of in a science fiction
film", as opposed to the "stainless steel, blue, smoke coming from
the bowels of heavily pipe laden" treatment of science fiction. In order
to make the film "fun" by creating more exciting action sequences and
because they believed that having the characters wear space suits and helmets
"would take all the romance out of it", the crew created the concept
of the "Etherium," an "outer space filled with atmosphere".
Several
changes were made late in the production to the film. The prologue of the film
originally featured an adult Jim Hawkins narrating the story of Captain Flint
in first person, but the crew considered this to be too "dark" and
felt that it lacked character involvement. The crew also intended for the film
to include a sequence showing Jim working on his solar surfer and interacting
with an alien child, which was intended to show Jim's more sensitive side and
as homage to The Catcher in the Rye.
Because of the intention to begin the film with a scene of Jim solar surfing,
the sequence had to be cut.
Writing
Writer
Rob Edwards stated that "it was extremely challenging" to take a
classic novel and set it in outer space, and that they did away with some of
the science fiction elements ("things like the metal space ships and the
coldness") early on. Edwards goes on to say that they "did a lot of
things to make the film more modern" and that the idea behind setting the
film in outer space was to "make the story as exciting for kids now as the
book was for kids then".
With
regard to adapting the characters from the book to film, Ron Clements mentioned
that the Jim Hawkins in the book is a "a very smart, very capable
kid", but they wanted to make Jim start out as "a little troubled
kid" who "doesn't really know who he is" while retaining the
aforementioned characteristics from the original character. The "mentor
figures" for Jim Hawkins in the novel were Squire Trelawney and Dr.
Livesey, whom John Musker described as "one is more comic and the other's
very straight"; these two characters were fused into Dr. Doppler. Clements
also mentions that though the father-son relationship between Jim Hawkins and
John Silver was present "to some degree" in the book, they wanted to
emphasize it more in the film.
Casting
Casting
director Ruth Lambert held a series of casting auditions for the film in New
York, Los Angeles and London, but the crew already had some actors in mind for
two of the major characters.
The character of Dr. Doppler was written with David Hyde Pierce in mind, and
Pierce was given a copy of the Treasure Planet script along with
preliminary sketches of the character and the film's scenic elements while he
was working on A Bug’s Life. He stated that "the script was
fantastic, the look was so compelling" that he accepted the role.
Likewise, the character of Captain Amelia was developed with the idea that Emma
Thompson would be providing her voice. "We offered it to her and she was
really excited," Clements said. Musker said, "This is the first
action adventure character that Emma has ever played and she was pregnant
during several of the sessions. She was happy that she could do all this action
and not have to train for the part" There were no actors initially in mind
for the characters of John Silver and Jim Hawkins; Brian Murray (John Silver)
and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Jim Hawkins) were signed after months of auditions.
Gordon-Levitt stated that he was attracted to the role because "it's a
Disney animated movie and Disney animated movies are in a class by themselves,"
and that "to be part of that tradition is unbelievable to me".
Musker mentioned that Gordon-Levitt "combined enough vulnerability and
intelligence and a combination of youthfulness but incompleteness" and
that they liked his approach.
Among
the lead actors, only Pierce had experience with voice acting prior to the making
of Treasure Planet. Conli explained that they were looking for
"really the natural voice of the actor", and that sometimes it was
better to have an actor with no experience with voice work as he utilizes his
natural voice instead of "affecting a voice". The voice sessions were
mostly done without any interaction with the other actors, but Gordon-Levitt
expressed a desire to interact with Brian Murray because he found it difficult
to act out most of the scenes between Jim Hawkins and John Silver alone.
Design and animation
While
designing for Treasure Planet, the crew operated on rule they call the
"70/30 Law" (an idea that art director Andy Gaskill has credited to
Ron Clements), which meant that the overall look of the film's artwork should
be 70% traditional and 30% sci-fi. The overall look of Treasure Planet
was based on the art style promoted by illustrators associated with the Brandywine
School Illustration (such as Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth), whose illustrations
have been described by the film's crew as being the "classic storybook
illustration," having a painterly feel to it, and being composed of a warm
color palette. The
animators took Deep Canvas, a technology which they had initially
developed for Tarzan, and came up with a process they called "Virtual
Sets," wherein they created entire 360 degree sets before they began
staging the scenes. They combined this process with traditionally-drawn
characters in order to achieve a "painted image with depth perception"
and enabled the crew to place the camera anywhere in the set and maneuver it as
they would maneuver a camera for a live-action film. In order to test how a
computer-generated body part (specifically John Silver's cyborg arm) would mesh
with a traditionally animated character, the crew took a clip of Captain Hook from
Peter Pan
and replaced his arm with the cyborg arm.
There
were around forty animators on the crew, and were further divided into teams;
for example, sixteen animators were assigned to Jim Hawkins because he appeared
on the screen the most, and twelve were assigned to John Silver. To ensure
"solidity" in illustration and personality, each major character in
the film had a team of animators led by one supervisor. Conli mentioned that
the personalities of the supervisors affect the final character, citing Glen
Keane (the supervisor for John Silver) as well as John Ripa (the supervisor for
Jim Hawkins) as examples. The physical appearance, movements, and facial
expressions of the voice actors were infused into the characters as well.
When
asked if they drew inspiration from the previous film adaptations of Treasure
Island for the character designs, Glen Keane stated that he disliked
looking at previous portrayals of the character in order to "clear his
mind of stereotypes", but that he drew some inspiration for the manner by
which Silver spoke from actor Wallace Beery, whom he "loved because of the
way he talked out of the side of his mouth." For the characterization and
design for Jim Hawkins, John Ripa cited James Dean as an important reference
because "there was a whole attitude, a posture" wherein "you
felt the pain and the youthful innocence", and he also cited the film Braveheart
because "there are a lot of close-ups on characters...who are going
through thought processes, just using their eyes."
Animators
also used maquettes, small statues of the characters in the film, as references
throughout the animation process. Character sculptor Kent Melton mentioned that
the first Disney film to use maquettes was Pinocchio, and that this paved the
way to the formation of an entire department devoted to character sculpting.
Keane noted that maquettes are not just supposed to be "like a mannequin
in a store", but rather has to be "something that tells you [the
character's] personality" and that maquettes also helped inspire the way
actors would portray their roles.
Audio
This
"70/30 Law" was not only applied to the visual designs for the film,
but also for the sound effects and music. Sound designer Dane Davis mentioned
that he and his team "scoured hobby shops and junk stores for antique
windup toys and old spinning mechanisms" in order to create the sound
effects for John Silver to "avoid sounding slick or sci-fi". The team
did some experimentation with the sound used in dialogues, especially with the
robot B.E.N., but opted to keep the actor's (Martin Short's) natural voice
because everything they tried "affected his comedy", and "the
last thing you want to do in a story like this is affect performances".
The
music from the film is largely orchestral in nature, although it includes two
moderately successful pop singles ("I’m Still
Here" and "Always Know Where You Are") from The goo
Goo Dolls frontman John Rzeznik and British pop-rock group, BBMak. Both songs
were written and performed by John Rzeznik in the film, but BBMak recorded
"Always Know Where You Are" for the soundtrack. The score was
composed by James Newton Howard, who said that the score is "very much in
the wonderful tradition of Korngold and Tiomkin and Steiner." The score has
been described as a mixture of modern music in the spirit of Star Wars and Celtic
music. Scottish fiddler alasdair Fraser is credited as the co-composer of the
track "Silver Leaves", and is also listed as a soloist in the film's
credits. Walt Disney Records released the film's soundtrack album on November
19, 2002.
Marketing
Prior to
and during its theatrical run, Treasure Planet had promotional support
from McDonald’s, Pepsi-Cola, Dreyer’s, and Kellogg Company. McDonald's included
promotional items such as action figures and puzzles in their Happy Meals and
Mighty Meals, Pepsi-Cola placed promotional film graphics onto the packaging of
a number of their soft drinks (Mountain Dew, Code Red Sierra Mist, Mug root
Beer, Orange Slice and Lipton Brisk), Dreyer's used their delivery truck panels
to promote ice cream flavors inspired by the film (such as "Galactic
Chocolate" and "Vanilla Treasure"), and Kellog included
film-branded spoons in their cereal boxes. Hasbro also released a line-up of Treasure
Planet action figures and toys.
Release
Theatrical premiere
Treasure
Planet held its world
premiere at the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood on November 17, 2002, though it was
also screened in Paris, France on November 6, 2002. The film is "the first
major studio feature" to be released in regular and IMAX theaters
simultaneously; this was done in the light of the success of Disney films that
were re-released in IMAX format, such as Fantasia 2000 and Beauty and the Beast.
Disk cook, chairman of Walt Disney Studio Entertainment, also mentioned that
the simultaneous release was a good way to distinguish themselves during the
competitive holiday season.
Critical reaction
Treasure
Planet received mixed to
positive reviews from film critics and (as of May 11, 2012) retains a 70%
"fresh" rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Roger Ebert of the Chicago
Sun-Times gave it 2.5 stars out of 4. While not completely writing off the
film, he felt that a more traditional take on the film would have been
"more exciting" and "less gimmicky". Andy Klein of Daily
Variety Gotham complained about the script, describing it as
"listless" and remarked, "If only its script were as amusing as
its visuals." A. O. Scott of The New York Times described the film as
"less an act of homage than a clumsy and cynical bit of piracy", and
went on to say that it is "not much of a movie at all" and a
"brainless, mechanical picture". Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment
Weekly described the film as "all cutesy updated fripperies and zero
momentum."
There
were also many critics who praised the film, including Stephen Hunter of The
Washington Post, who stated that the film "boasts the purest of Disney raptures:
It unites the generations, rather than driving them apart". Leah Rozen of People
stated that the film "has imagination, humor aplenty and moves
briskly", and that "the animation, combining traditional and digital
techniques, is ravishing." Claudia Puig of USA Today said that the film's
most noteworthy feature is "the artful way it combines the futuristic and
the retro", and went on to say that the film doesn't have the "charm
of Lilo & Stitch" nor the "dazzling artistry of Spirited Away",
but concluded that Treasure Planet is "a capable and diverting
holiday season adventure for a family audience." Kim Hollis of Box Office
Prophets stated that "there's plenty to recommend the film – the
spectacular visuals alone make Treasure Planet a worthwhile watch," though
expressing disappointment because she felt that the characters were "not
all that creatively rendered".
Box office
The film
was an American box office bomb, grossing only $38 million in the United States
and Canada and $110 million worldwide. Consequently, Disney's Buena Vista
Distribution arm reduced its fourth-quarter earnings by $47 million within a
few days of the film's release.
Home video
Treasure
Planet was released in DVD
and VHS format in the U.S. and Canada on April 29, 2003. The DVD includes
behind-the-scenes featurettes, a visual commentary, deleted scenes, teaser and
theatrical trailers, the music video for the song "I'm Still Here" by
John Rzeznik, and a virtual tour of the RLS Legacy.
The DVD retained the number one spot in Billboard's top sales for two
weeks and the VHS was number one in sales for three weeks. From April to July
2003, Treasure Planet brought in $64 Million in DVD sales. If this would be added to total revenue, Treasure
Planet could be considered a moderate success with total revenues just
under $174 Million.
Awards and nominations
The film
was nominated for the Academy Award for Best animated Feature, but lost to
Spirited Away. It was also nominated for a number of Annie Awards.
Possible sequels
Before Treasure
Planet was shown in cinemas, Thomas Schumacher, then president of Walt
Disney Feature Animation, mentioned the possibilities of having direct-to-video
releases for Treasure Planet as well as a television series. He stated
that they already had "a story and some storyboards and concepts up and a
script for what a sequel to [Treasure Planet] could be," and that
they also had a "notion" of what the series would be.
Video games
Several Treasure
Planet video games were released in 2002. Disney Interactive released the
naval strategy game Treasure Planet: Battle at Procyon for the PlayStation 2 in
October, while Sony computer
Entertainment America released a Treasure Planet video game for the PC,
PlayStation, and PlayStation 2 in November. A series of games collectively
called Disney's Treasure Planet: Training Academy was also released in
2002. It was composed of three games (Broadside Blast, Treasure Racer,
and Etherium Rescue), and players with all three games could unlock a
fourth game (Ship Shape). Another game called Treasure Planet was
released for the Game Boy advance in December.
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